When Simon woke up in bed in the as he’d dowo dozen times before, it was with relief that bordered on disbelief. He just y there unmoving for several minutes as he stared at the ceiling. Finally, he worked up the ce to turn his head, whiehow mao feel climactic. After that, he flexed his hands and wiggled his toes before he finally tried sitting up. He’d feared that after the years or decades, he’d been lyih the sand, he would have fotten how to move, but that wasn’t the case.

  The first thing he did was look in the mirror and sider asking it a question to see if he was still capable of speech. That was a silly fear, of course, and he shrugged it off with a forced ugh as he reached for the wine.

  “Fuck that,” he muttered as he decided the st thing he wao see right now was his character sheet. His experience robably at like minus a milliht now, and holy, he was better off knowing. Besides - he was sure his skills had dropped since he hadn’t used them in such a long time, and that would probably hurt miven how much he’d suffered to improve them.

  Instead, after he took a long drink, sav the lost sensation of taste that had beeored before trying a bit of the food and reveling just as mu that. Intellectually he khe bread and cheese he had was mediocre at best, but that didn’t stop it from tasting amazing in the moment. “Well, what now?” he asked himself ohat was done.

  From here, he could see all the gear he usually took on his quests into The Pit, but that was the st thing he wao see right now. There was no way he was going down there right now. Holy, he wasn’t sure he was going to that deep ever again. As far as he was ed, level twenty was a no-go zone. Level six might be, too, holy.

  He wasn’t sure he had it in him to be a zombie or statue agaiing stabbed to death or dying of exposure was fine. Normal deaths could be painful or humbling, but the crazy ones where he died a living? He was pletely over it.

  Simon looked around for literally anything he could do besides gearing up for a fight. He opened up the dresser and saw nothing of i. Still, iop drawer under a stranger’s small clothes, he finally found something promising: a handful of fishhooks. At first, he didn’t realize what they were because they were made of bone, but eventually, his brain decided that was the only thing they could be used for. He looked around the room for a fishing pole or at least a little string he could tie to the spear.

  Fishing would solve nothing, but that recisely the point. Right now, the st thing Simon wao do was solve or fix anything. He just wao be for a while and remember what that felt like.

  Fishooks in hand, he went outside with nothing but his dagger, waterskin, and a little food. He didn’t recall there being a shed or anything, but he hadly looked for one, so anything ossible. A quick look around showed him that there was no shed, but a few tool pegs were built into the back wall of the .

  There he found a shovel and an axe meant for chopping down trees instead of the one ihat was obviously meant for chopping up monsters. Above those, though, just below the eves where he almost missed it, was a simple wooden fly-fishing rod. It cked a reel or any other fancy bits and pieces he was used to, but it had plenty of line and looked like it would do the job.

  While Simon walked to the part of the stream he thought was the best pce to do this, he pted the pole. It looked so like his grandfather’s that for a long time after he sat down in the shade by the water, all he could do was look at it and remember what the old man had tried to teach him before his PSP had monopolized his attention. His parents had used the man as a free babysitter for years. Still, Opa, as he preferred to be called by his beloved grandchildren, had always tried to get him to take an i in being outside more.

  At the time, he figured it ure perversity: the kids wao be ig TV, so why not take them fishing, hiking, camping, or literally anything but sitting on the couch. “He robably just trying to keep me from getting fat,” Simon said with a wry smile.

  His grandfather had been a strange guy in a lot of ways. As Simon turned away from the bittersweet remembrances about how old-fashiohe man was, he was as surprised as anyone when he looked down and found that he’d tied the Palomar knot without even looking.

  That made Simon smile. “How the hell did I mahat?” Simon asked himself as he baited it with a small piece of cheese before making a half ass cast into the water.

  After that, he just waited. After all - the fishing itself didn’t really matter. It was just something to do. All that really mattered was sitting in the shade and stretg his limbs or turning his head whenever he wanted. It was something he had no idea he’d ever appreciate, but after he’d lost that ability for lohan he’d been alive, he certainly did.

  He spent the hour or so just enjoying the breeze before a deeper question finally tugged at his psyche. How long had he y there frozen? How old did that make him now, mentally speaking? Would that have made him as old as Opa? Older? Of course, he didn’t know for sure, but it was an iing question.

  “How old a anyway?” he asked himself, trying to do some mental math. If he was 30, then his dad was like 50, which would have made his grandfather like 70…

  “No, that ’t be right,” Simon corrected himself. “He was seventy-something when he died, like what? Four years ago?” He started ting on his fingers when he suddenly felt a pull on the pole that made him lose his train of thought as he struggled to catch it before it was yanked out of his hand.

  There was no reel on this a fishing pole, so he had to pay out the line and then pull it ba over and over manually, letting the fish tire itself out until he could drag it out onto the nd. That took several minutes, but when he finally had the foot-long fish flopping around on the grass, it felt like a more signifit victory than just about any of the floors he’d quered to date. It there with the first time he’d killed the skeleton knight, and he whooped in response.

  “Take that!” he yelled triumphantly before he moved the flopping fish onte rock. He cked a bucket, so he would hold off on gutting it just now, but o suffocated, he could put it ba the water until it was time to gut it and take it home. Gutting some strange brown trout species wasly something he was looking forward to. Still, Opa had always made him do it himself, and he was sure he remembered how to do it at least, as well as how to tie those damn knots.

  Of course, remembering how hard he’d always tried to get out of gutting fish as a child made him think of something that cast a cloud over his otherwise wonderful day. When Opa had died, Simon had been so busy with his guild oest MMO that he’d done everything he could to skip the funeral. It had felt shitty at the time, but irospect, he felt even worse about it now. Given the number of hours he’d spent pying that stupid fishing minigame in World of Spellcraft, you’d think it was some kind of homage to the old man. It wasn’t, though. It was just him wasting time chatting with online friends and colleg achievements.

  That made him look at the fish differently when he finally put it ba the water and cast his life again. How many years he’d wasted as a statue didn’t matter nearly as much as how many years he’d wasted doing stupid shit like that. Not all his time pying video games was a waste, of course. He’d learned a lot about almost anything you could think ardless, nothing he’d learned on his PSP would help him nearly as much as the few lessons his grandfather had tried to teach him while Simon struggled hard to get out of them.

  He spent the rest of the day fishing and almost caught two more fish, but they both got away. That was fine, he told himself. How many fish could he really eat before they went bad anyway? It wasn’t like he had any way to fry them. Even though he’d only caught one of the slippery little bastards, this was still the most peace he’d known since he decided to e to the pit.

  It was almost su when he finally decided to call it a day. He was enjoying the nostalgient as long as he could. With a grunt, he got up, dusted off his ass, and then after winding up his line around the pole, he picked up the fish and found a rock, making quick work of the thing. His dagger was shit for sg, but no matter how many bones he was going to have to pick out of his dionight, he was determio enjoy it,

  “Thanks, Opa,” he said quietly as he started toward the in the darkening twilight.

  The fire would be out by now. He’d fotten about that, but he should be able to fix that with a half-assed fire spell if he was careful. It was fully dark by the time he could see the by starlight. It was only when he was 50 yards away he watched a pair of goblins skulking out of the nearby forest.

  It wasn’t hard to see him. The little bastards had a crude torch with them. That surprised Simon, but mostly because they didn’t usually try to burn the house down around him until the third night. He crouched down oh and watched them get closer and closer, but they didn’t try to light the wood alight. Instead, they tested the closest shutters.

  That at least made seo him. They weren’t trying to burn the pce dowhese were the ohat had made footprints trying to break into his p the past. “That mean’s they’re going for the door,” he whispered to himself, rising to his feet as he advanced purposefully. The st thing he wanted were goblins in his house. They smelled like shit.

  Simon intercepted them just before they reached the door. The goblin without the toroticed him and screeched in arm just before he brought the fishing pole down otle bastard’s head, hard enough to crack it. The sed goblin responded by waving the torch bad forth in his face like a on, by Simon wasn’t scared by this. He dropped everything he’d been holding, pulled his dagger, and waited for an opening.

  When the goblin swung too far to the left, Simon responded with a vicious kick that sent it flying against the wall so hard that it bounced off it. He was on it before it could rise again, stabbing it until it stopped squirming. Ohat was done, he did the same to the first one, making sure it was dead too. After that, he ed his knife on the long grass before finally standing again with their tor hand.

  “That’s what you get,” he said, spitting as he looked at the two pathetisters.

  It was only wheched his fish and his pole that he noticed that it had cracked, just like the goblin’s skull from his attabsp;

  “Oh well,” he shrugged. “No more fishing in this lifetime. It was fun while it sted.”

  He tossed the pole aside and the inside. A little fire and a lot of fish would go a long way to making his life a better pce. Besides - trying to go fishing two days in a row would have been b as hell, right?

  “Tonight, I’m going to eat, finish off that wine, and chill the hell out,” he told himself, “and tomorrow, I’m going to find a way out of this hellhole.” He’d tried it before, of course - but he was a different person now.